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Thursday, March 24, 2011

Well it's happened again. Another video we have made at LaunchSquad has spun upward and out of control. And this time, it's something we were intending. We created a video for a company called Jumio who is still in stealth mode about what they actually do. So, the little bit that I know, I can't tell you. But what I can tell you is that Facebook Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin (Yup, the dude from The Social Network) invested a substantial amount in the start-up.

And Jumio being the cool and edgy client that they are wanted to do something that would stir up some conversation around their company. And so here is what we came up with.

The Path to Viral.When the Huffington Post wrote an article on Jumio's funding from Saverin, they embedded our video into the article. The Huffington post of course gets a ton of reads, and a lot of those readers checked out the video. And what they saw was not what they were expecting from a company that changes the way we handle electronic payments. Most of them viewed the video as a horrific example of scare tactics and propaganda. They accused our expert Sebastian Cole of being a liar and a fear mongerer. The comments shot up on the article, and there was quite a bit of controversy around the video.

We wanted to take it as far as we could, to the point of being over the top. Very few people seemed to get this video was made to be tongue in cheek. When the video went viral, Wade Roush wrote this Xconomy article on the video itself. He even interviewed Nick Markham who played "Sebastian Cole". And Nick definitely held his own both in character and out.

Making It

When making this, I tried to shoot the dollar bills in as menacing a way as possible. That shot of Lincoln sitting there is way creepy. I mean, there's really nothing happy about the dollar bill. I also did a bunch of post grading on Nick's interview to give it that orange and blue look. It was really the first time I had played with that color spectrum. Editing it was pretty easy since the main force comes from the narrators voice and the creepy images. I kept bursting out laughing when I would roll playback.

I love how everything turned out. It's awesome that so many people, even doubters of the technology, know the name Jumio now. And honestly, I still laugh every time we see that baby and hear the thunder clap. "It could kill our children!" People took that seriously? Lawl.